The Husband Hour(58)

Matt felt like someone had pulled the stool out from under him. He gripped the edge of the bar. And then his phone buzzed with a text. Lauren. I do want to get the real story out there. How’s tomorrow morning?





Chapter Thirty-One



Lauren crossed her legs and slid back in the chair, uncomfortable with Matt’s nearness as he adjusted her mic.

She had chosen her clothes carefully for the interview and wore a navy-blue dress with cap sleeves and seed-pearl buttons running down the front. Her hair was loose. She was flushed with anxiety.

“Are you impatient with me already? We haven’t even started yet,” he said, smiling.

“No, it’s fine.”

Matt returned to his seat opposite her, Henny’s living room configured the exact same way it had been the last time.

“Henny must really like you to let you do this to her furniture. We had a book-club meeting here once, and when Nora tried to move a plant, Henny threw a fit.”

He stood up and adjusted an LED light and then sat back down in the chair across from her.

“Henny’s a good sport. I’m lucky I found her. I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways lately.” He smiled.

Lauren looked around the room, trying not to fidget with the mic wire.

“When you said, ‘Give me one hour,’ you never really meant just one hour, did you?” she said.

He leaned forward in his seat. “That’s not enough for me to get everything I need, no. But I hoped that one hour of talking would be enough to convince you that there was a story worth telling here. That even an ugly truth is more valuable than a beautiful lie.”

They locked eyes for a minute. She searched for something to say, but before she could speak, Matt shifted into interview mode.

“So let’s get to work,” Matt said. “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.” And she was.

“During Rory’s second season with the Kings, you lived with him in LA, correct?”

She nodded. “Yes. I spent the summer after my senior year in DC making up some credits—I traveled a lot and had to basically do a ninth semester—and Rory came to see me in August. He asked me to move to LA with him. This was heading into his second season.”

“Was there talk of getting married?”

“It was unspoken, but there was the sense that school was behind us, geographical separation was behind us. We felt like, Okay, we can finally do this thing.”

“So it was a happy time,” Matt said.

“It was a very happy time.” Except she had walked away from her mentors and a possible job at the Washington Post.

There were few journalism jobs in Los Angeles. She got an interview at Variety. Excited, she felt confident going into the meeting. But she quickly realized, talking to a guy who spent half the twenty-minute interview checking his phone, that her solid understanding of the Electoral College and global economic and energy crises, as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every major politician’s position on fracking, meant less than nothing in that town. She hadn’t gone to a movie in years and didn’t know Colin Firth from Colin Farrell.

By late fall, two months after she moved to LA, she was desperate enough to consider taking a job at an entertainment blog called Cinema Chick that paid so little, it would cost her more in gas to get to and from the office than she would earn.

“Why are you putting so much pressure on yourself?” Rory asked her.

“Because I want to be good at something,” she said. “You can’t be the only one who’s good at something.”

He hugged her. “Where is this coming from?”

She didn’t know exactly. She was twenty-two years old. Most people her age were moving to new cities with friends, living six people to a divided-up one-bedroom, and landing assistant jobs. Or starting grad school. They were free and it was all about trial and error. For Lauren, she couldn’t afford an error. She already had something to lose—Rory. And maybe herself, a little. She didn’t want her entire identity to revolve around being Rory Kincaid’s girlfriend.

She cried to him that night. Cried, because she didn’t know what to do about her career.

“You’re going to be a great journalist someday,” he said, hugging her again. “Come on, Lauren. You know you have to walk before you can run, right?”

She nodded. “But that’s easy for you to say. You’re running.”

“But think about it—my starting line was probably the day I first laced up skates fifteen years ago. In fifteen years, you’ll be working at the Washington Post. Or the New York Times.”

“You think we can move back east some day?”

“Sure. I won’t be playing hockey forever. Or maybe I’ll get traded to the Capitals.”

She smiled. “I’ll be old and gray.”

“And I’ll still be hot for you.”

They made love. And she took the job at Cinema Chick.

“Did Rory enjoy living in LA?” Matt asked.

“He did. We both did. We fell in love with the house we bought. It was this Spanish-style bungalow just a few blocks from the Beverly Center in West Hollywood. It was so different from the suburbs we’d grown up in.”

The house was a modest one-story with a clay-tile roof, arched windows and doors, and a galley kitchen. It seemed exotic to both of them. Lauren loved the colorful ceramic tiles in the entrance hall, and Rory was sold as soon as he saw the orange tree out back.